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Well, it's official, I got a good butt fucking from Coolest Cooler

GRADS

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Sent them approximately $300 for their kickstarter campaign a few years ago. Held out hopes that I would eventually get my ice chest. Got an email today that due to tariffs they are closing up shop. First and last kickstarter. Fuck.:mad::mad::mad:
 

rrrr

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I found this on their Kickstarter webpage. It should make you feel better that you're not the only dumbshit that volunteered to pay $500 for a cooler that can be produced in China for $28.

$13,285,226 pledged of $50,000 goal
62,642 backers

If you lived in Oregon, you could collect twenty bucks of your, errr, donation. That would buy a nice Walmart Pacific Northwest flannel shirt. :D

After an investigation by the Oregon Department of Justice, Coolest Cooler reached a settlement in 2017 in which it agreed to provide coolers to all Oregon backers – and those who had already complained to Oregon regulators.

While the Portland company pledged to work to ship coolers to its remaining backers, the settlement offered Coolest Cooler an out if it could not do so by the summer of 2020.

In that case, the settlement calls on the company and Grepper to provide $20 to any of its crowdfunding backers who never received their cooler. Grepper is personally responsible for those payments and cannot legally avoid them through bankruptcy.

Due to tariffs? LOL...

It's their way of blaming Trump for the scam they have perpetrated for five years, a perfect excuse for the scamster Oregon liberals.
 
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GRADS

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I found this on their Kickstarter webpage. It should make you feel better that you're not the only dumbshit that volunteered to pay $300 for a cooler that can be produced in China for $28.

$13,285,226 pledged of $50,000 goal
62,642 backers

If you lived in Oregon, you could collect twenty bucks of your, errr, donation. That would buy a nice Walmart Pacific Northwest flannel shirt. :D

After an investigation by the Oregon Department of Justice, Coolest Cooler reached a settlement in 2017 in which it agreed to provide coolers to all Oregon backers – and those who had already complained to Oregon regulators.

While the Portland company pledged to work to ship coolers to its remaining backers, the settlement offered Coolest Cooler an out if it could not do so by the summer of 2020.

In that case, the settlement calls on the company and Grepper to provide $20 to any of its crowdfunding backers who never received their cooler. Grepper is personally responsible for those payments and cannot legally avoid them through bankruptcy.

Due to tariffs? LOL...

It's their way of blaming Trump for the scam they have perpetrated for five years, a perfect excuse for the scamster Oregon liberals.
I blame Trump for not getting my Cooler.
 

rrrr

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Look, there's no reason to be depressed about it. If you cash in a couple of your Apple shares, you can still get in on the ground floor of this deal:

Here we go again: The $600 Infinite Cooler seeks crowdfunding cash

Years after the smash-hit Coolest Cooler left its Kickstarter backers cold, the makers of this new mega cooler want to do better. Can they?

It's called the Infinite Cooler, and like the Coolest Cooler that came before, it promises to be the Swiss army knife of camping trips and backyard barbecues. There's a blender attachment and a built-in Bluetooth speaker, sure, but also an integrated bug light, a wireless phone charging cradle, color-changing LED lights and, for some reason I can't quite fathom, a built-in HD camera and touchscreen controls. The Infinite Cooler website even touts a "social media-connected app." You know, for a cooler.


https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/six-hundred-dollar-infinite-cooler-hits-indiegogo/

Bwaaahahahaha! :D


I blame Trump for not getting my Cooler.

Attaboy! That's my Grads.


.
 

Carlson-jet

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Show the email so we can laugh twice as hard please. :D

GreGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!

Is full of SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTT!!!!
 

GRADS

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Show the email so we can laugh twice as hard please. :D

GreGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!

Is full of SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTT!!!!
Hello Kickstarter Coolest Cooler Backers,

As you may know, late last year the U.S. government imposed 10% tariffs on many products imported from China. Like many small businesses dramatically affected by this situation, we viewed this as a short term situation where, hopefully, calmer heads would soon prevail.

However, as of early summer, the “trade war” continued, and the tariff was increased to 25% which affected our entire Coolest product line. It was devastating to our business, and I know it was felt by many of you in one way or another as consumers, and thousands of small businesses everywhere.

Today, I’m sad to report this has proved to be an insurmountable challenge for Coolest and we are forced to close down operations.

For those who have been following our updates for the past few years, you’ve seen us work around every imaginable challenge, and with your support, we kept going.

We kept going when it became immediately obvious that the Coolest would cost much more to manufacture and ship than anyone paid for it on Kickstarter. That meant we had to take loans to cover the difference and while many said it would be impossible to make and ship, we kept going and to date delivered forty thousand of them to our backers.

We kept going when there were manufacturing strikes abroad that stopped us for months, racking up unbelievable bills.

We kept going when there were recalls on product parts we had no money to pay for.

We kept going when thousands of people became upset that we couldn’t go faster.

If you opened our updates along the way, you saw how we were immediately in the hole, making no profit as a business, taking on vast sums of debt to keep the doors open and ship to backers. You saw how we eventually had to attempt to sell Coolest products at retail in order to make any profit which would be used to ship Coolests to our remaining backers.

Still, we kept going. We had volunteers, friends, neighbors jumping in, lending money, offering help any way they could.

For five years.

We knew there would be obstacles, especially when we broke all records when this concept resonated with so many more people than we ever dreamed, but that’s part of the process of Kickstarting an idea into life. Creators propose an idea, backers fund the idea, and then we work as hard as we possibly can to bring it to life. We’re tremendously proud we were able to bring the Coolest Cooler we promised to life and into the hands of so many of our backers, but tremendously sad that we didn’t manage to get it to everyone.

In our last updates over the last two years we shared how we switched factories to reduce overall costs, then tried to earn more revenue by creating additional products to sell like the Solar Lid and the Vibe soft sided cooler; the idea being if we could make a profit on those then we could use that money to make and ship more backer rewards. To do that, we leveraged the good graces of our manufacturing partners and took on more debt.

But unfortunately that all happened just as the trade war intensified and then the Trump administration increased our tariff from zero to 25%.

In the end, that tariff, and this ongoing trade war, destroyed our last options to continue.

If you are a backer and missed any updates along this long and difficult journey, please see this link for our major updates — you can see we shared nearly 60 backer updates on Kickstarter, along with nine months of our Manufacturing Blog and ongoing email updates, that we fought every day for this idea, for this dream, for each and every backer:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryangrepper/coolest-cooler-21st-century-cooler-thats-actually/posts

For those who don’t know much about how the tariffs have hurt almost every business working with China, please consider the following—there have been levies placed on over $360 Billion worth of goods from China. Certainly we are not the first US company to be ruined as a direct effect of this trade war. Here are a few links about the situation

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3008939/donald-trump-says-10-percent-china-tariffs-will

https://apnews.com/5cef096900654f43aad0d132ccfc3467

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/us/politics/trump-china-tariffs.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-says-u-s-china-close-on-phase-one-of-trade-deal-11573584025

Obviously, any time politics are involved in something like this, lots of emotions flare up. We understand that.

But this isn’t a political statement. It’s a business reality that has led to our business no longer being able to operate.

We’re just as angry as we know you will be, and frustrated these tariffs were the nail in the coffin for something that we’ve worked so long and hard on. This is not the way we wanted our Kickstarter journey to end.

Our Appreciation and Disappointment

Whether you are for or against these tariffs, and whether the world’s biggest economies can move ahead and resolve this, I’m sorry to report that we can't hang on long enough to see how it ends. And so it’s with a heavy heart I have to share that we must close the company.

For those who have read every one of our updates and cheered us on all along, you have more appreciation than we can verbalize. As you know, it’s been a very difficult and public process that generated a lot of love for our product but equal disdain that we couldn’t fulfill it fast enough.

For those who received their Coolests and supported us and enjoyed so many days in the outdoors with this dream product, thank you for carrying the torch and realizing our vision of getting outside with your families and friends.

For those who have not received a Coolest, it’s devastating for us to share this, and there is no way of expressing our full upset and disappointment that we cannot keep the doors open or fulfill your order. We’ve had to begin winding down the company because of the tariffs. We know that there will be a lot of anger and upset that people didn’t get a product they backed on Kickstarter. While everyone knows that’s a risk with Kickstarter projects, no doubt you’ve seen us try relentlessly for five years to make it happen for you. We are especially sorry that, after all this effort and time tackling what felt like an insurmountable list of problem-after-problem, we were driven out of business as just another a trade war casualty. Please know we did all we could.

For our families, friends, neighbors, and those in the Kickstarter community who supported us, lent time and money, sent encouraging notes, volunteered, gave us personal hope in a very hard and humbling entrepreneurial journey, I thank you the most. You kept us going and saw how hard we tried when everyone else didn’t know. Thank you.

1. We are liquidating all inventory as we close the company and must use that to pay our creditors. We have zero funds to create or ship anything unless people pay for the existing inventory as it is dispersed at various locations now. If there are any product(s) left as you read this, you can find them on this page available for purchase at a discount while supplies last. https://coolest.com/collections/all

2. If you have not received your Kickstarter reward, you may be eligible for up to $20 per the terms of the Oregon Department of Justice AVC agreement from 2017, which gave us time and instructions to fulfill backers rewards. To qualify to receive that payment, click this link to enter your Kickstarter Backer information, your updated address and a Tipalti payable account to receive a maximum of twenty dollars payable by June 30th of 2020. You will be receiving a separate email directly from Tipalti to register shortly.

3. Coolests have appeared on eBay or secondary sales sites throughout these years and no doubt this announcement will begin the resale market of these units. We can’t control that but we hope that one day everyone has the opportunity to use a Coolest product. They truly were great products.

We know that none of these 3 options are ideal or replace your belief and patience in this process.

While we are not the only Kickstarter project to fail, we do know that we’ve all been in this for a long time together. We are sorry we came up short and we did all that we could until this trade war forced our hand.

We learned a lot of lessons these past few years, and no doubt we made plenty of startup mistakes. For now, we are focused on liquidating the products, attempting to pay creditors, and winding down the company. But we hope you felt heard as we responded to hundreds of thousands of backers emails along the way and shared updates every time we hit a major obstacle or achieved some momentum. People may judge the Coolest Cooler and Kickstarter because of our end result, but we remain grateful for a process that enables entrepreneurs with a dream to find people willing to support an idea that wouldn’t otherwise exist in the world.

Once again, we are sorry and as frustrated as anyone. This was our dream project and we could never have anticipated the year’s of struggle or this last year’s U.S.-China relations leading to this final anticlimactic outcome.

As we enter the holidays, all we can do now is share this sad news and again our appreciation for believing in us in the first place. We are wishing you and your loved ones a happy holiday season and a new decade filled with outdoor adventures.

Sincerely,

Ryan and the entire Coolest Team throughout the years.
 

Carlson-jet

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Wow,

Ryan was the Coolest. LOL

Thanks for the laugh bud. :p

And again, Back to one G. :D
 

rrrr

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.

Grads is correct, it's all Trump's fault. Of course, some of you might be skeptical about this claim, since the Kickstarter campaign began collecting money in 2014, and the tariffs weren't enacted until December 2018.

But those with TDS will believe anything.

Note that the email sent to the suckers, errr, investors in Coolest, make claims that the tariffs forced them out of business, but they didn't provide any evidence the tariffs specifically apply to their product.

If it was true, it would have been easy for them to provide a link to or post a company document that details the specific action by the Trump administration that affects plastic food and beverage coolers.

Why do you suppose that is?

Orange man bad!!

As you may know, late last year the U.S. government imposed 10% tariffs on many products imported from China. Like many small businesses dramatically affected by this situation, we viewed this as a short term situation where, hopefully, calmer heads would soon prevail.

However, as of early summer, the “trade war” continued, and the tariff was increased to 25% which affected our entire Coolest product line. It was devastating to our business, and I know it was felt by many of you in one way or another as consumers, and thousands of small businesses everywhere.


In our last updates over the last two years we shared how we switched factories to reduce overall costs, then tried to earn more revenue by creating additional products to sell like the Solar Lid and the Vibe soft sided cooler; the idea being if we could make a profit on those then we could use that money to make and ship more backer rewards. To do that, we leveraged the good graces of our manufacturing partners and took on more debt.

But unfortunately that all happened just as the trade war intensified and then the Trump administration increased our tariff from zero to 25%.

In the end, that tariff, and this ongoing trade war, destroyed our last options to continue.


Obviously, any time politics are involved in something like this, lots of emotions flare up. We understand that.

But this isn’t a political statement. It’s a business reality that has led to our business no longer being able to operate.

We’re just as angry as we know you will be, and frustrated these tariffs were the nail in the coffin for something that we’ve worked so long and hard on. This is not the way we wanted our Kickstarter journey to end.

Whether you are for or against these tariffs, and whether the world’s biggest economies can move ahead and resolve this, I’m sorry to report that we can't hang on long enough to see how it ends. And so it’s with a heavy heart I have to share that we must close the company.

Orange man bad!! :D :D
 
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Carlson-jet

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And so it’s with a heavy heart I have to share that we must close the company and skip away with the proceeds and a really good bullshit story to feed the small investors.

Yore friend, Ryan the coolest.


 

78Southwind

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Over the years, I always thought @GRADS was full of shit. Basically, that he was just fucking with us over the years to try to create controversy, you know like how he tells us he is a Trophy Husband but he really still has a small business and how he tells us he is a Democrat but he is really a Republican. Fuck...after this one I am pretty sure I was wrong. I have finally come to the conclusion that he has been truthful to us all these years.o_O
 

rrrr

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Hey Grads, I found a video I'm sure you will enjoy.

The series is called Million Dollar Genius, which you have to admit is true, because Ryan The Coolest convinced 62,682 people to send him $13,285,226.00. That total includes your $300. :D

This episode features three amazing stories: Ryan Grepper who invented the ultimate cooler, Dan Martinson who created the Gear Ties, and David Hon who designed a folding bicycle.

https://www.history.com/shows/million-dollar-genius/season-1/episode-5
 

Ouderkirk

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And so it’s with a heavy heart I have to share that we must close the company and skip away with the proceeds and a really good bullshit story to feed the small investors.

Yore friend, Ryan the coolest.



And that is EXACTLY what they did.

The key with these things...how much was Ryan taking in salary? These sort of grift operations work by taking exorbitant salaries for the leadership team, a nominal investment in R&D to pass the smell test, and next to zero into mfg. They bleed the company of as much as they can, and skip when there is some plausible external excuse.
 

GRADS

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@GRADS You got 2 more of your followers to click on your thread and post in it. :D
Not to mention click and post on a thread about butt fucking....hmmm.o_O They were probably disappointed when they realized it was about an ice chest.
 

boatpi

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They could shift production to Vietnam and pay 10%, all BS.
 

LargeOrangeFont

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@GRADS You got 2 more of your followers to click on your thread and post in it. :D

Not to mention click and post on a thread about butt fucking....hmmm.o_O They were probably disappointed when they realized it was about an ice chest.

No, they are just trying to get that Grads Butt Fucking as the top result when you Google search GRADS.
 

LargeOrangeFont

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Why are you googling "Grads Butt Fucking" :eek::D @GRADS:)

DC75D58B-CC78-40EE-AA30-F8D873755658.jpeg
 
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GRADS

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You should actually Google "grads butt fucking"....there's some quality videos that came up.:cool: I hear the Vaseline calling.
 

Lavey29

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Sent them approximately $300 for their kickstarter campaign a few years ago. Held out hopes that I would eventually get my ice chest. Got an email today that due to tariffs they are closing up shop. First and last kickstarter. Fuck.:mad::mad::mad:

My neighbor got his over a year ago. I think it's pretty bad ass.
 
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